Backing Up to an External Drive
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From: Richard Maine on 30 Jun 2010 01:00 John Albert <j.albert(a)snet.net> wrote: > Plug in a Time Machine backup, and... well.... won't boot. But your OS X system disk will boot and then will restore from the TM backup. This rant seems rather overdone. Not that I'd trust *ANY* single backup source with really important data. I'm not going to argue that TM is the world's salvation or anything. But I think the rant on it is overboard. I have, let's see.... there's my TM backup. I occasionally run SuperDuper, though not religiously any more (I do make sure to run it before doing anything major like an OS update). I've got Mozy for remote backups. Lots of the stuff that would be most painful to use is backed up in a way by making copies on other of my machines. And I recently got a DropBox account, to which I will probably copy a few of the more critical things. So no, I don't rely solely on TM. But you know, if something gets trashed, TM is the first place I go to, as it is so handy. -- Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience; email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment. domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
From: TaliesinSoft on 30 Jun 2010 06:53 On 2010-06-29 23:45:11 -0500, John Albert said: > You're much better off with a "bootable clone" as your backup. Yes, you > have to backup "manually". But the results are better. I have my SuperDuper! backups scheduled to automatically run each night. Am I misunderstanding what is meant by "manually" in the above quotation? -- James Leo Ryan -- Austin, Texas -- <taliesinsoft(a)me.com>
From: AES on 30 Jun 2010 12:20 In article <4c2acbd7$0$6689$2c56edd9(a)usenetrocket.com>, John Albert <j.albert(a)snet.net> wrote: > You're much better off with a "bootable clone" as your > backup. Yes, you have to backup "manually". But the results > are better. I do what you recommend: In fact, the "bootable clone" of my primary MacBook is an identical "standby MacBook" cloned in Target Disk mode using SuperDuper!. If _anything_ fails on the primary MacBook, the standby is _immediately available_, with exactly the same software, settings, preferences, interface, and all data up to last cloning. So, I can instantly get back into action with the standby, while the primary goes off to the repair shop. (And with my personal needs, I can live with a bottom of the line Mac as primary machine, and afford two of them instead of one higher-cost machine.) But of course with this approach, if you make a mistake and delete something important on your primary machine without realizing it and then do a cloning as your "backup", that data is gone forever from your primary machine _and_ your "backup".
From: Richard Maine on 30 Jun 2010 12:40 AES <siegman(a)stanford.edu> wrote: > In article <4c2acbd7$0$6689$2c56edd9(a)usenetrocket.com>, > John Albert <j.albert(a)snet.net> wrote: > > > You're much better off with a "bootable clone" as your > > backup. .... > But of course with this approach, if you make a mistake and delete > something important on your primary machine without realizing it and > then do a cloning as your "backup", that data is gone forever from your > primary machine _and_ your "backup". In my view, a quite serious problem with this approach, if you use it as your only backup, is what happens if you ever really need the bootable capability. That would typically mean that your original disk was trashed for any of several reasons. The problem is that you are then running on a system with no backup. Furthermore, failures do often tend to come in multiples of more than one. That's so both for failures of hardware and of human use. If the first disk was trashed because of some mistake you made, the *LAST* thing you should be doing is immediately boot up your only copy and start working with it. Much better to at least get some rest first. And then your priority should be to get another backup - not to continue working with the now unbacked-up system. Now if you have something else in addition to the clone, life is much better. Then it would be plausible to boot from the clone and start using it. A Time Machine backup or one of the remote backup options would be good choices. -- Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience; email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment. domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
From: Paul Goodman on 30 Jun 2010 17:25
On 2010-06-30 00:45:11 -0400, John Albert said: > "Thank you for your suggestion and reply. I ended up getting a drive > pre-formatted for a Mac. I used Time Machine to do my first backup > this afternoon." > > Sounds great.... until..... > ....something goes wrong with your internal drive and you need to BOOT > UP from another source. [SNIP LOT OF GOOD ADVICE] > I can fully understand why for some folks doing mission-critical > moment-to-monment document changes, why it's important to have a > "continuous backup" running. But 99.99% of day-to-day users don't need > anything like this. For "the rest of us", it's far more important to > have that bootable backup close at a hand for a moment of extreme need. I forgot to mention that the computer I am using is a macbook pro, running snow leopard. I am just running time machine one time a day, right before I go to bed, and disconnecting the drive, rather than letting it update every hour. Hourly backups seemed like overkill, but I probably would have done it if I had a desktop instead of a laptop. > - John -- Paul Goodman |